Is Time Ours or Is It God's?
In Parashat Emor, the verses in Leviticus 23:1-44 name and describe the sacred times of the Jewish calendar: Shabbat, Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur, and the Pilgrimage Festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Time becomes a holy thing, and the "normalcy" of time — of one day being no different than any other — is forever differentiated by the weekly Sabbath and by these special festive days.
The Sound of Shofar: Leading Us to Revelation and Freedom
Count off seven sabbath years — seven times seven years — so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. (Leviticus 25:8-10)
In this week's portion, the Jubilee year is established. Called yovel, our parashah explains how every forty-nine years — seven weeks of seven years — in the seventh month, on Yom Kippur, the shofar of freedom is to be sounded throughout the land for all its inhabitants. This iconic verse to proclaim freedom throughout the land is inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
Love Is Not Enough: The Demands of Relationship with God
Another name for this week's Torah portion is Parashat HaToch'chah — the portion of reproach. It contains a list of curses so terrible that traditionally the Torah reader chants them quickly and in a hushed tone so as not to call attention to them. And no one wants that aliyah! The curses are the punishment for disobedience, and they must have truly struck fear in the hearts of our ancestors.
The curses come just after the promise of blessing — if we follow God's ways. Rain in abundance, good crops, peace, victory, and fertility are all ours if, as the portion begins, ". . . you walk in my statutes and guard my commandments and do them" (Leviticus 26:3). We might mistakenly feel the parashah is about the classic "reward and punishment." But I see it differently. I see it as an apt closing for the Book of Leviticus, which began with a call to relationship — Vayikra — and ends again with a call to relationship. God's message can be interpreted as, "If you are a true partner with Me then our relationship will be healthy, but if you ignore Me, spite Me, hurt Me, and leave Me, how can we possibly go on together?"
Reduced to Numbers . . . Do We Count?
Were they people? Not to the Principal. Not even employees? They were more like digits, widgets, sprockets, more cogs on the command chain. (Joshua Cohen, The Book of Numbers, Oxford, 2014, p. 1.87)
Incredulous. That's how I felt, after requesting and then learning my Uber passenger rating. You see, drivers get to rate and rank you too.
"4.8! That's it?" I thought. "I've never been impolite or unfriendly. I never cancel a request after submitting one. What reason could there be for denying me a full five stars?"
Once again, here was one small example of the many ways each of us is reduced to numbers as we go about our post-modern lives.
Recognizing Torah Voices
Among the most exquisite stories in all of Tanach is Genesis 27, Isaac's blessing of Jacob. In this essay I wish to highlight the artistry of this author. I shall also draw attention to the bracketing structure that the redactor has built around the story.
Jacob's Ladder
As a kid, I loved to play "cat's cradle," the game with a piece of string with the ends tied together. You start with the string around your hands and then interlace it between your fingers to make different patterns with names describing what they look like.
Not by Might, Not by Power
The widely-heralded book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, by Paul Kennedy, (New York, Random House, Inc.) was published in 1987. Kennedy's thesis is that a superpower emerges, grows, plateaus, and eventually declines, replaced by a new nation.
Our (More-or-Less) Four Matriarchs
At the core of this week's parashah is the creation of a people, Israel, as a confederacy of tribes. One might expect a people's legend of origins to derive from events valorous or noble.
The Simple Art of Thanksgiving
As a rabbinical student in Israel I camped out with my classmates under a star-glutted Negev sky to see Comet Hyakutake burn its trail through the night. It was a Shehecheyanu moment, and we offered the blessing with wide eyes.